YESTERDAY we commemorated 50 years of the ‘Caribbean Community’ (Caricom), but it is a failure. We are not here to make friends but to protect our vulnerable.

Achieving economic integration is a small ambition, but Caricom has failed even that, far less to take us into the 21st century.

Our farmers are unprotected from the vagaries of the food import cartels who are destroying all of our small farmers by a range of unregulated and slippery methods. Small locally-owned businesses are being invaded and recolonised by multinational monopolies.

We share the Caribbean Sea so if there is a massive oil spill in Guyana, the entire Caribbean tourism and fishery product is doomed.

Seismic surveys, like many other extractive activities worldwide, require ‘the long, hard look’ of environmental science and management, and yet Guyana, Suriname, Barbados and T&T approve these activities ‘willy-nilly’.

The Sargassum plague is invading our space and Caricon seems deaf, dumb and blind.

Our region is being battered by an emergency climate catastrophe, yet each micronation has little or no climate response.

Our fisheries are collapsing with different fishery laws, and variable or no enforcement. Member states are cowered into signing secret contracts with Big Oil where we get pittances, displaced indigenous communities, open pit mines, polluted rivers and a contaminated fishery.

Gluttonous politicians run amok with offshore accounts for ‘shell companies’ to legally hide bribes and kickbacks both here and extra-regionally. A dozen different currencies are being propped up and manipulated. Caricom ought to protect the region and is it not!

FFOS proposes that Caricom implement superior regional legislation that must be integrated locally for:

1. Trafficking and regional radar monitoring.

2. Protecting migratory species, including birds, marine mammals, reptiles and fish. Marine turtles are still slaughtered in some of our member states despite being internationally protected.

3. Environmental safeguards and emergency oil spill response protocols, including fingerprinting of oil to hold polluters accountable.

4. Monitoring of the oil and gas elites, including their balance sheets where bribes are paid to get our oil and gas with royalties at a fraction of what is paid in the North.

5. Joint climate preparedness to create a fund to assist the region and control greenhouse gas emissions.

6. Promoting and incentivising eco-tourism to earn from, use and protect our natural biodiversity.

7. Bureau of standards, especially for carcinogens used in agricultural and food production.

8. Industrial and tourism policies to promote and encourage small business tourism to keep the wealth home and prevent the brain drain.

9. Transparency, including integrity in public life, anticorruption and procurement of public spending or sale of assets.

10. A coordinated Central Bank legislation to manage regional currency stability.

It is time we call on Caricom to get serious about what the business of our region really must be.

Unless we learn to live together as brothers, we will perish together as fools (Martin Luther King Jnr).

Gary Aboud corporate secretary Fishermen and Friends of the Sea (FFOS)